


Simple, Safe Hunger

by Blissymbolics



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Cibophobia, Eating Disorders, M/M, Sonia Kaspbrak's A+ Parenting, Vomiting, contamination OCD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-19 03:03:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22004194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blissymbolics/pseuds/Blissymbolics
Summary: Dairy gives you cancer. Soda weakens your bones. You can’t trust the food industry. They want to hook you on fat and sugar, get you addicted and bleed you dry. You can’t trust others to prepare your food for you. Who knows where their hands have been? What corners they’ve cut? Your body is all you have. Don’t feed it garbage. Don’t feed it poison.Because that’s what food is:Poison.But still, he’s hungry.He’s starving.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 6
Kudos: 185





	Simple, Safe Hunger

Eddie has always been small for his age.

He eats what’s put in front of him: lettuce and lima beans, cucumber slices and cauliflower.

Whenever Richie invites him over for dinner, Eddie’s mom interrogates them about what they’ll be eating. She writes out a long list for Richie’s parents: no excess sodium, no artificial preservatives, nothing fried, nothing glazed, and absolutely no more than twenty grams of sugar.

Richie’s parents ignore the list and make Eddie promise not to tell his mother. They serve him pasta swimming in buttery sauce with juice so sweet he can feel it in his teeth. They let him and Richie eat popcorn in front of the TV and have ice cream before bed.

Still, nights at Richie’s house can be rough, as his stomach usually pulses with cramps well into the early morning, painfully adjusting to all the foreign substances inundating his system.

On one occasion he has to run to the bathroom some time after midnight to throw up everything they fed him. His whole body shaking, his face coated in sweat, Richie standing guard outside the door. Richie’s mom notices him in the hall and asks if Eddie needs to go home, but Richie practically barricades the door with his body.

Eddie is fifteen and still hasn’t hit a growth spurt. All the other boys in the group have at least six inches on him.

And he’s hungry all the time. He buys what he can with his meager allowance, but usually the other Losers will pitch in some snacks that he can smuggle back home.

In tenth grade they’re required to take a health and wellness class. They’re told to track their caloric intake over the course of a week to assess the quality of their diets. Eddie adds the numbers up on Sunday night, and realizes that on an average day he only eats about 1500 calories.

That can’t be right.

He does the math again, and suddenly doesn’t feel so guilty about the potato chips he snuck home in his bag.

He’s eaten from McDonalds exactly three times in his life. He managed to keep it a secret the first two times, but the third time his mother looked ready to beat him when she found out. She grabbed him by the arms and shook him hard, screaming in his face, asking why he would do such a thing. Doesn’t he know those places are breeding grounds for bacteria? Cesspools crawling with germs? The meat oozing E. coli? Filthy hands wiping their snot and spit all over cheap, unclean meat that’s been sitting stagnant under heating lamps that are swarming with flies? Doesn’t he know what flies do when they land on meat? They lay their eggs. Doesn’t he know what those eggs hatch into? Maggots. Doesn’t he know that he’s eating maggots?

She pours salt into a glass of warm water and makes him drink it until he throws up.

He’s forty and hasn’t eaten fast food since.

Richie hands him an ice cream cone, but he’s only able to take several licks before it starts melting down his hand.

He’s scared, he realizes. He’s scared of the sugar. He’s scared of diabetes. His feet being amputated. His teeth rotting out. His hands start shaking and his forehead breaks into a sweat and he has to fake a stomachache to get out of finishing the rest, and it’s not entirely a lie because he can already feel his intestines cramping into knots.

They have cake at a birthday party and Eddie manages to eat two bites, but none of the frosting.

They order pizza and he picks off most of the cheese.

Dairy gives you cancer. Soda weakens your bones. You can’t trust the food industry. They want to hook you on fat and sugar, get you addicted and bleed you dry. You can’t trust others to prepare your food for you. Who knows where their hands have been? What corners they’ve cut? Your body is all you have. Don’t feed it garbage. Don’t feed it poison.

Because that’s what food is:

Poison.

But still, he’s hungry.

He’s starving.

He’s dizzy. He’s cold. His nose won’t stop running. He falls asleep ten minutes into a movie and Richie has to shake him to get him to wake up, and when he finally opens his eyes it takes him a minute to remember where he is, and he sees Richie’s relief quickly shift into concern, and then fear.

It’s Bev’s birthday and the Losers gather at the diner on Cliffton to celebrate. Eddie makes an excuse to leave after skimming the menu and realizing that there’s not a single thing he can eat.

He never realized how much of society revolves around food. All the rituals and rules that seem invisible until you’re on the outside looking in. All those small pleasures that carry people through the day. Meals they bond over, recipes they pass onto their children, the way people share food on a date and pick off each other’s plates as if germs were creatures that only existed in fairytales.

Mike’s family likes to eat from their garden, but Eddie’s not brave enough for that. He doesn’t like being reminded of where his food comes from. That the tomatoes on his plate grew out of the earth, the carrots once surrounded by soil, exposed to worms and maggots, insects swarming across fields that were fertilized with cow shit and that’s not even taking into account the pesticides. And meat is even worse. It was once part of a living animal. A disgusting mass of flesh carved up and packaged, pulsing with muscles and veins, fat dripping around the edges.

The whole thing was a disgusting process. And sometimes just the very act of chewing and swallowing is enough to make him feel sick.

He begins peeling all his vegetables, anything that may have come in contact with the dirt. Then he peels his fruit, anything that may have touched another person’s hands. He boils everything he can get away with, hoping to kill off any bacteria nesting in the pores. He scrubs the kitchen counters with bleach, soaks the sponges in boiling water, and changes out the dish towels at the end of every wash. He cuts up a sweet potato and eats it in starchy strands. He holds a bowl of rice and eats it five grains at a time. He cuts an apple into thin slices and chews them so slowly that the last one is brown by the time he gets to it, which of course means that he can’t eat it. Each tiny mouthful is probably the equivalent of one calorie. If he can just repeat the motion two thousand times, he’ll be fine.

But then he’ll have to do it again tomorrow. And the next day. Every day for the rest of his life.

“Eds, you’re shaking,” Richie whispers, and Eddie can feel his breath ghosting against the back of his neck.

Eddie stopped coming over for dinner months ago, but he still likes to sneak in after dark to curl up in Richie’s bed and play dumb when Richie wraps an arm around his middle and pretends to be asleep.

“Just cold,” he mumbles, and it’s not a lie. He’s always cold. Even beneath the heavy blankets with Richie’s body heat insulating the sheets.

Richie presses closer against his back, the warmth of his body a welcome brand. Eddie laces their hands together, trying to siphon some warmth into his chronically numb fingers.

Eddie knows that he can’t control death. He can’t control the air he breathes or the germs clinging to his hands. He can’t control the contagions carried by those around him. He can’t control bad drivers or icy roads, floods, fires, or stray gunshots. And he can’t control the spontaneous cruelty of cancer or the congenital defects buried in his DNA. But he can control what he eats. It may be the only thing within his control at all.

And although he’s ashamed to admit it, some part of him likes the hunger. He finds that it’s strong enough to mask all the other random and natural pains that come with the burden of having a body. The hunger is a convenient excuse to dismiss all the routine ailments that would otherwise torture him with uncertainty: headaches, muscle cramps, nausea, vertigo, fatigue, these could all be symptoms of a brain tumor, MS, or AIDS, but no, he doesn’t have to lend credence to any of those theories. He doesn't have to worry. Because for him, it’s nothing more than hunger.  


And hunger has a very simple cure.


End file.
